In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.

According to documents Corless provided the Irish Mail on Sunday, malnutrition and neglect killed many of the children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high. “If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],” Corless said. “Couldn’t they have afforded baby coffins?”

Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others. They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were “usually gone by school age – either adopted or dead.”

According to Irish Central, a 1944 local health board report described the children living at the Home as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” and with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.”

Corless has a vivid recollection of the Home Babies. “If you acted up in class some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies,”

@curb, @256, there's actually a children's book that I LOVED that's about that same thing. Mary Ann, a steam shovel, and her operator Mike Mulligan, are determined to prove that Mary Ann is just as good as any diesel powered shovel (basically the machines in the "buried diggers" story).

Mike finds a small town that is about to build a new town hall. The authorities react with disbelief when Mike claims that he and his steam shovel Mary Anne can dig the cellar in a single day; they protest that it would take a hundred men a week. Mike insists that Mary Anne can finish the job in one day, though he privately has some doubts.

At sunup the next day, Mike and Mary Anne begin work and just complete the task by sundown. But, they neglected to dig a ramp for driving out of the construction pit. A watching child suggests that Mike take the job of janitor for the town hall, and that Mary Anne should be converted to a boiler for the town hall's heating system.

I've never liked the Turing test as a test for true AI. To pass it you simply have to convince people you're not a computer in a 'chat' program, a problem that's extremely hard to do in AI, but in this age of big data is pretty easy to fake. I suspect it works the same way Watson did for Jeopardy.

A proper test for AI would involve spontaneous creation, but no idea how you'd formalise that.